Hot Air in Spain

The fate of humanity is being hashed out one comma, qualifier, and footnote at a time in a futuristic conference center in Valencia, in the heart of Spain’s paella country.

More than 150 delegates from the Nobel Peace-prize winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — the United Nations’ global warming experts — are trying to distill years of research and thousands of pages of earlier studies into a single report short and clear enough even journalists and policy-makers can understand it. Easy on the shellfish, guys.

These are also powered by hot air. (Wikipedia)

The goal: produce the new roadmap for all future chatter about how to tackle climate change. It’s going to be a mandatory accessory for the 13,000 delegates at the UN-sponsored conference in Bali, Indonesia, next month who will be trying to figure out how to replace the Kyoto Protocol when it expires in 2012. Yikes: Roughly 39 trees will give their lives to make sure everybody in Bali has a printout of the summary in their briefcase.

“This is going to be the Cliffs Notes for most people,” says Peter Altman, a Climate Policy Project Manager at the National Environmental Trust in Washington, D.C.

The Valencia meeting is the endgame of months of back-and-forth between governments, scientists and lobbies to determine just what the final summary should include. It’s apparently not a pretty process, with lots of closed-door haggling over the shape of the final document.

Having read through one of the versions of the draft summary — prepared in August, before governments spent another two months whacking it like a piñata — we’ve noticed some interesting differences compared with the prior IPCC reports that went into the meat grinder. (Three previous summaries here, here, and here.)

Perhaps the biggest? Things are actually probably worse than thought (and worse than last summarized by the IPCC in 2002), which means the world should take more action sooner, the draft summary says.

The high end of temperature estimates for this century has been increased — as high as 6.4 degrees Centigrade — largely because of a new emphasis on the carbon “feedback cycle.” That is, oceans take in CO2 kind of like Homer Simpson snarfs down donuts: They suck up lots of carbon dioxide until they start warming – at which point they start absorbing less.

Another titillating difference? An earlier IPCC report on efforts to fight climate change conceded that “the impact of the [Kyoto] Protocol’s first commitment period relative to global emissions is projected to be limited.” That’s been rubbed out of the draft summary, though the U.S. government fought to keep it in. Stay tuned.

Re: Greg and the volcanoes-
"The true extent to which the ocean bed is dotted with volcanoes has been revealed by researchers who have counted 201,055 underwater cones. This is over 10 times more than have been found before.

About Environmental Capital

Environmental Capital provides daily news and analysis of the shifting energy and environmental landscape. The Wall Street Journal’s Keith Johnson is the lead writer. Environmental Capital is led by Journal energy reporter Russell Gold, and includes contributions from other writers at the Journal, WSJ.com, and Dow Jones Newswires. Write us at environmentalcapital@wsj.com.